being to require a grant to discharge at once the whole of the debt, but only to enable the prince to pay it off gradually out of his increased allowance. Pitt also spoke of the propriety of making an adequate provision for the splendour that ought to attend the heir-apparent of the British crown, remarking that the allowance which would now be asked for was smaller than that which had been settled on the prince's grandfather, Frederick Prince of Wales, while the value of money was far less now than then. The moment was not very favourable for prodigality: the expenses of the war were enormous, and constantly increasing; millions were wanted for subsidies, and services avowed or secret; new taxes, not very onerous in their several amounts, but considerable in the aggregate, perplexing in their number and variety, and vexatious in their collection, had been imposed; provisions were exceedingly dear; and, notwithstanding the prosperity of some branches of trade, many classes of the people were suffering severe privations. Many members of the House were dissatisfied and alarmed, and some of them expressed their feelings strongly. Mr. Sumner thought that, before the Commons proceeded to vote the prince any more money, they ought to be informed how the preceding grant for the payment of his debts had been applied. Mr. Curwen warned the House that one of the leading causes of the French revolution had been the unthinking prodigality of the princes of the royal family; and Mr. Martin exclaimed, that the only sure way of maintaining monarchy, in times like the present, was to prevent it from becoming oppressive to the nation. It is said that the prince was exceedingly hurt by these and other discussions which took place in both Houses, and that he complained that the king and the minister had broken faith with him; but, while it is very doubtful whether he had not deceived himself as to the assurances and intentions of his father, it appears to be proved that Pitt had never pledged himself to ask, at so critical a moment, a separate grant for the liquidation of the debts. The amount of these debts the chancellor of the exchequer stated to be not less than 630,000l. He proposed that 65,000l. should be added to his highness's income, which would thus be about 140,000l. a year; that 25,000l. per annum should be deducted for payment of the debts, which might thus be all paid off in the course of twenty-seven years; and that, in order to prevent the incurring of further debts, no future arrears should be suffered to go beyond the quarter, no claims should be admitted after its expiration, and all suits for recovery of debts due by the prince should lie against his household officers only. Even the Foxite opposition were divided on these delicate matters; for, although the Prince of Wales had transferred his political confidence from Mr. Fox to the Duke of Portland, some of them certainly hoped to see him wear the blue and buff once more, and calculated that his present irritation against Pitt would lead to that happy party result.

Mr. Lambton boldly and broadly insisted that parliament ought both to pay the 630,000l. and increase the prince's revenue to 150,000l. clear. Fox, preluding that the allowances to heirs apparent had always been influenced by party motives, or had ever been sheer party matters, said he would vote for the additional 65,000l. a year, as moved by the minister-provided only that requisite precautions were taken to obviate the necessity of future applications for money. He added, however, that he thought that a contribution from his majesty's civil list ought to have come in aid of the prince, and have obviated the necessity of any painful discussion; that he must object to the smallness of the sum set apart for the annual payment of the prince's creditors; and he proposed that not less than 65,000l. a-year, together with the revenues of the duchy of Cornwall, should be set aside for the liquidation of the debts. Mr. Grey, on the contrary, said that, though the prince was entitled to a proper establishment, there would be more dignity in declining than in requiring an expensive one; that times of public distress ought to check the spirit of prodigality; that other means ought to be resorted to than the money of the people; that a refusal to liberate the prince from his embarrassments would doubtless prove a mortification, but it would, at the same time, awaken a just sense of his imprudence, and in the mean time his creditors, no longer presuming on the facility of parliament, and deprived of expectations from the public purse, would readily agree to a composition of their claims. Mr. Grey concluded by moving, that, in lieu of 65,000l. proposed by the minister, the addition to the prince's revenue should be only 40,000l.; but this motion, being put to the vote, was negatived by 260 against 90a minority, however, larger than usual. Sheridan, who was not present at this debate, delivered a startling speech at a subsequent stage of the proceedings. He declared that, from political differences, his intimacy with the prince had ceased, but that at the same time he must defend his royal highness from injurious imputations, and give it as his "positive opinion that the debts ought to be paid immediately, for the dignity of the country and the reputation of the prince, who ought not to be seen rolling about the streets, in his state-coach, as an insolvent prodigal." He even declared that the prince had not really been a party to the promise and pledge given to parliament, in 1787, that he would contract no more debts. He said that, on the subject of expense, and of keeping solemn pledges to the public, the prince would not suffer by comparison with the king." For these words. Pitt called him to order; but Sheridan proceeded to say that the king, in the early part of his reign, had given a solemn assurance that the civil list should not be exceeded; and yet, since that promise, the debts of the civil list had been paid to an amount which would, at compound interest, make nearly 7,000,000. He concluded with proposing that the king and queen should contribute, the one

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10,000l., the other 5000l. a year; and that the further deficiency should be made good out of sinecure offices, &c. In the House of Peers the Duke of Clarence delivered a very hot speech against ministers, accusing them of having eagerly endeavoured to deprive his brother of the popularity to which he was justly entitled, and of having singled him out as an exception to the unbounded liberality with which they supplied the foreign princes who applied to them for pecuniary assistance. In the end, and after two months' agitation of the question, it was settled, by a bill which received the royal assent on the 27th of June, that the Prince of Wales should have an annual revenue of 125,000l., together with the rents of the duchy of Cornwall, which were valued at 13,000l. more; that 73,000l. should annually be set aside, out of these sums, for the payment of his creditors, under the direction of commissioners appointed for that purpose by parliament; and

The Duke of Clarence was not alone in this debate. The Duke of Bedford expressed himself in much the same manner, saying that a variety of circumstances would occur to candid minds in extenuation of the errors of the prince, which were of a juvenile description, and which by no means called for any asperity of censure. But it was the Scotch Foxite Peer, the ultra-liberal or quasi-republican Earl of Lauderdale, that went to the greatest lengths for his Highness of Wales. Debts, he said, of a much larger amount, had been discharged by parliament in preceding reigns, without exposing and stigmatizing the princes who had contracted them; and did it become so great and opulent a people to be severe and parsimonious towards a young prince (his Royal Highness was in his thirty-third year, or within three years of being as old as the Chancellor of the Exchequer), from whose virtues, abilities, and accomplishments they might justly expect so much contentment?

that, in order to prevent the accumulation of future debts, the regulations suggested by the minister should be adopted, and strictly enforced. All this had been carried by great majorities in both Houses, but there were few who really thought that this settlement would be a final one.

On the same day (the 27th of June) the session was closed by the king in person, who expressed his hope "that the present circumstances of France might, in their effects, hasten the return of such a state of order and regular government as might be capable of maintaining the accustomed relations of peace and amity with other powers;" but he also said that our main reliance must be on our naval and military forces.

Long before this the wretched remnant of the fine but small and ill-commanded army we had sent to the Netherlands and the northern frontiers of France was collected in barracks at home, or drafted off to other quarters of the world. The Dutch democratic party-who had done their utmost to facilitate the progress of the French, and discourage, thwart, and disorganise the forces which their stadtholder, the Prince of Orange, had collected after the fall of Nimeguen, and the retreat of the Duke of York behind the Waal-openly declared themselves everywhere for friendship and alliance with the Gallican republic, and for the entire abandonment of the old connexion with Great Britain and the forced connexion with Prussia.

Early in December, 1794, the Duke of York returned to London, leaving the command of the British and Hanoverian troops to Count Walmoden, Hanoverian nobleman, said to be closely, though illegitimately, connected in blood with the royal family of England. Walmoden, and the general officers under him, seem to have been fully possessed of the old notion that war was not to be waged in winter, and to have slept over the fact that, in the north of Holland, the frost was often severe enough to convert the canals, and all the smaller rivers, into solid high-roads, capable of bearing any weight that men could put upon them. The troops were in cantonments here and there, when, in the middle of December, after one or two nights of very hard frost, the French crossed the Waal on the ice, drove in the few videttes that were on the alert, and carried all the posts in the Isle of Bommel. But on the 30th of December, General Dundas, who was serving under Walmoden, advanced rapidly from Arnheim with only 8000 men, - almost entirely British infantry, and drove the French, in spite of their vast superiority of number, and the batteries they had thrown up or taken possession of, back beyond the Waal, with a considerable loss in men, and the loss of several pieces of cannon. This affair was in the highest degree honourable to the staunch infantry of England; but it could be of little service to the common cause, for Pichegru soon collected a force of 200,000 men, the people of the country continued to favour the French, and the English army, with a miserable, and in part fraudulent, commissariat, with an equally bad medical staff, was totally unprovided with most of the requisites indispensable in their hard and trying circumstances: the sick and wounded had neither medicines nor able surgeons to attend them; and often wanted food, covering, and proper places of shelter to receive them. The indignation of the army was the greater as it was perfectly well known that the government had provided, with a lavish hand, for all their wants, as far as money, orders, and injunctions could provide for them, and that a variety of those comforts needed by the soldiery in a cold, inhospitable country had been furnished by private patriotic subscriptions raised throughout England. The standing orders of the army, and the orders of the day issued by the Duke of York, were humane, clear, and altogether excellent; but, unfortunately, there was generally not only a want of an active superintendence over the execution of these orders, but also a want of knowledge and method in our officers as to the means of carrying them into execution. Moreover, England had not at that time any very numerous body of able well-trained surgeons to draw upon, and the pay offered was scarcely sufficient to tempt good surgeons into the service. Both on the medical staff and in the commissariat a great many French emigrants and other foreigners were employed pro tempore; and, although there is no cloaking the iniquity of some of our own native-born subjects, it is easy to under

VOL. III.-GEO. III.

stand that most of these foreigners kept only in view the making of as much money as they could during the campaign. The medical department was improved more rapidly; but we never had anything like a good, honest, effective commissariat, until Sir Arthur Wellesley (the Duke of Wellington) was intrusted with the command of our forces in Portugal; and half of our military failures, and a very large portion of the excess in expense of all our expeditions, are attributable to this one great want. When the Duke of York quitted the army, and came home, matters became much worse, and the acts of cruel neglect and of peculation more flagrant and barefaced.*

Five days after the French had sustained their unexpected and inglorious defeat at the hands of General Dundas, Pichegru crossed the Waal upon the ice with an enormous force. It became evident that nothing but a hasty retreat could possibly save the remains of the British army; and, after spiking their heavy cannon and destroying all the ammunition they could not carry off, they retired towards the Lock on the 6th of January. The French van pressed upon their rear. Though disheartened and in some of the disorder inevitable in a hasty retreat, the gallant English infantry halted, formed in order of battle, charged, and, after four charges, attended with various success, drove the French from the field with a frightful loss, for the most of the battle had been fought as it were hand to hand. On the 10th of January fresh columns of the republicans crossed the Waal; and on the 11th Pichegru, with a condensed force of 70,000 men, fell upon General Walmoden in the defile of the Greb, between Arnheim and Nimeguen, in the confident hope of destroying or reducing to an unconditional surrender all that remained of the British army and of their German subsidiaries. But Walmoden, after sustaining an assault, which was long and general, made good his retreat. Four days after this Pichegru fell upon some posts which had been occupied to cover the retiring army: these posts were gallantly held until the retreat of the British was secured, and then the troops who had

*The following report was made by an eye-witness, whose veracity and accuracy were found to be well attested:-" January 21st, 1795. Our hospitals, which were so lately crowded, are for the present considerably thinned. Removing the sick in waggons, without clothing sufficient to keep them warm in this rigorous season, has sent some hundreds to their eternal home; and the shameful neglect that prevails through all that department makes our hospitals mere slaughtering houses. Without covering, without attendance, and even without clean straw, and sufficient shelter from the weather, they are thrown together in heaps, unpitied and unprotected, to perish by contagion, while legions of vultures-down to the stewards, nurses, and the numberless dependents-pamper their bodies, and fill their coffers with the nation's treasure; and, like beasts of prey, fatten on the blood and carcases of their unhappy fellow-creatures, of whom not one in a hundred survives, but perishes under the infernal claws of those harpies, still thirsting for more blood, and rioting in the jaws of death. For the truth of what I say, I appeal to every man in the army, who has only for a few hours observed, with an attentive eye, the general rule of conduct in our hospitals of late. And witness here the scene before me, while I now write. A number of men lying on a scanty allowance of dirty wet straw, which, from the heat of their bodies, sends up a visible steam, unable to help themselves; and, though a sufficient number of men are liberally paid for their attendance, none has been near for several hours, even to help them to a drink of water."-Annual Register. It was notorious that, when an unfortunate man was sent to the hospital, he generally perished through neglect, unskilfulness, or misery.

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held them drew off unpursued by the enemy, some of whose columns hastened to take possession of Utrecht and Rotterdam. By this time the English had lost nearly all their camp-equipage and baggage. The multitude of inferior commissary agents, who had been appointed to procure the requisites, had so grossly deceived their employers that no provisions had been collected. Besides the open enmity of the successful French, the English found concealed enemies in every Dutch town and village through which they passed; for the majority of the Dutch people looked upon them as the original cause of the calamities inflicted on their country, and took every opportunity of insulting them in their misery, and of adding to their sufferings. These sufferings, particularly among the many sick and wounded, were as cruel as any that ever fell to the lot of a retreating army: they were, in the midst of a rigorous winter, carried in open waggons, exposed to the weather, and destitute of all comforts and accommodations. Many were frozen to death, many dropped and perished through want; especially during the day and night marches of the 16th and 17th of January, when they had to cross the sandy, desert, houseless districts that intervened between Utrecht and the towns of Deventer and Zutphen, in the midst of an unceasing hurricane of wind, snow, and sleet. After a march of nearly two months, through countries everywhere hungry and beggarly, and in many parts churlishly inhospitable or inimical, the wretched fragment of the Duke of York's army reached the mouth of the Elbe and embarked at Bremen for England. Our ally, the Stadtholder, arrived in this country long before them. The democrats at the Hague began to threaten his person and his family; and the same triumphant party, shutting their eyes to the exactions and oppressions they must expect from the French, were everywhere insulting and menacing the aristocratic party, and preparing solemn entrances and public feasts for Pichegru and his generals. Taking with him his son, the Hereditary Prince of Orange, the stadtholder, not without difficulty, escaped from the Hague to the small port of Scheveling, where, on the 19th of January, he and his son embarked in an open boat.* The fugitives arrived at Harwich on the following day. The democrats of Amsterdam, who had appointed a provisional council of government, planted the tree of liberty in the chief places of their city, and mounted the French cockade, gave an enthusiastic reception to Pichegru, who made his entrance at the head of 5000 men on the 20th of January. The republican general went through the form of proclaiming the magnanimity of France (who only wanted to assist the peoples of Europe to break the chains of their despots), and the freedom and independence of the

On the morning of their departure from the Hague a mob as. sembled and insisted that the stadthoider should be brought to justice for the part he had taken in favour of the English. His guards, however, protected him from their violence, and conveyed him to the seaside, where he was again in danger, till the guards that accompanied him dispersed the populace.-Ann. Regist.

Seven United Provinces. Haerlem and Leyden adopted the same measures as Amsterdam; and, while the opposite party of Dutchmen ran away or concealed themselves, or at the least kept close within their houses, the democrats in nearly every town and village welcomed the French, and declared themselves their disciples and friends. In the province of Zealand there lay a considerable squadron of Dutch men-of-war: the admiral, said to have been all along hot in the French interest, hoisted the French flag on the 30th of January, took possession of Flushing and Middlebourg, and, on the 4th of February, concluded a very agreeable negotiation with the republican general Michaud. The States-General, or such portions of them as chose to assemble at the Hague, an open, defenceless town, where they were entirely at the mercy and under the dictation of the French army and the Dutch mob, issued proclamations, calling upon the people, in consequence, as they said, of the stadtholder's flight, to admit the friendly troops of the French republic. Scarcely one of the formidable and well-provided fortresses which lined and studded the country had made more than a show of resistance: they had nearly all opened their gates to the French before the Duke of York quitted the army; but some few fortresses on the frontiers of Brabant still remained in the occupation of Dutch troops, or of Germans who had been in the pay of the stadtholder. In this number was Bergen-op-Zoom, one of the strongest fortresses in the world, and at the time in an admirable state of preparation-if only the garrison within it had been true to their trust. But Bergen-op-Zoom, with all the rest of them, threw its gates wide open at the first invitation, and its garrison fraternized with the French. A requisition of clothes and provisions for the use of the republican army, to the value of one million and a half sterling, caused some consternation among the thrifty Dutchmen; but the republican party, or all the ultra-democratic Dutch, were in an ecstasy at their triumph by means of French bayonets over their countrymen who had triumphed over them by means of Prussian bayonets in 1787; and they were flattered by the convocation of a Representative Assembly on liberty and equality principles, which abolished the hereditary stadtholderate, with all the forms of the preceding constitution, published in good Dutch the Declaration of the Rights of Man, reversed the sentences passed against the democrats of 1787, and recalled all the exiles. It is to be supposed that this class of patriots were not greatly or immediately affected by the embargo which the English government immediately laid upon all Dutch ships and goods in the ports of Great Britain, Ireland, and our colonies; but the seizure or detention of the Dutch East Indiamen and cargoes was a terrible disappointment to the French, and at the same time a heavy blow to the monied interest and trading aristocracy, who abhorred the French and their principles. The Council of Government, the merest puppets of the

French, sent over two delegates to London to remonstrate and claim restitution. Lord Grenville, as secretary for foreign affairs, asked them in what capacity they wished to be received? The delegates replied, as representatives of the Sovereign People of Batavia. The secretary said, he knew of no such delegating power, and therefore must decline any further conference with them. The ministry soon took into consideration the important subject of the Dutch colonies: an expedition was prepared; and on July the 14th Vice-Admiral Sir G. Keith Elphinstone, and Major-General Craig, with a land force, appeared in the neighbourhood of the Cape of Good Hope, and took possession of Simon's Town. From that point the troops advanced towards Cape Town: they soon carried by assault the strong post of Muyzenberg, which commanded the road to it, and there waited for some reinforcements from the island of St. Salvador. These forces, under the command of Major-General Alured Clarke, arrived at the beginning of September; and then the whole army-still a very small one-pushed forward to Cape Town. The Dutch governor, who had rejected a proposal to place the whole colony under the protection of Great Britain (the only protection which could save it from the French) till the peace, yielded at once to this display of force, and surrendered the town and castle on the 23rd of September. Instructions were also sent out to our naval and military commanders in the East Indies to prepare for the reduction and occupation of the Dutch

settlements in that part of the world; and by the end of the year, or by the beginning of 1796, all the places the Dutch held in the island of Ceylon, with Malacca, Cochin, Chinsura, Amboyna, and Banda, were taken possession of, with scarcely any resistance. Other plans of easy execution were arranged for the seizure of the Dutch colonies in the West Indies and on the coast of South America; so that it was made evident that the Batavian republic would soon lose all those foreign possessions and plantations which had once poured a continuous stream of wealth into the United Provinces.

Such, for a long time, had been the equivocal conduct of the King of Prussia, that it excited little or no surprise, when, in the spring of this year, he concluded a separate treaty with the French, whom he had been the first of all the coalition to assail. By this treaty, which was definitively settled at Basle, in Switzerland, on the 5th of April, the king ceded to the republic all the Prussian territory on the left bank of the Rhine, and the republic restored to Prussia the territories she had overrun on the right bank of that river. Both the contracting powers pledged themselves not to grant a passage through their respective territories to the enemies of the other. All prisoners taken respectively since the commencement of the war were restored, including the prisoners taken by the French from the corps of Saxony, Mayence, the Palatinate, HesseCassel, Darmstadt, &c., who had been serving with the army of his Prussian majesty. Until a treaty